Many writers tell me they have difficulty expressing themselves honestly, whether in their fiction or, more especially, when writing about themselves.

For some reason, writers feel that it makes them more vulnerable or somehow weak to write - i.e. make public - how they truly feel. They are ashamed of bad thoughts or embarrassing actions they’d rather forget.

This is a shame because it’s honesty that can not only add verity to a piece of fiction but, contradictorily, can endear you reader to you in a way that you can’t achieve by faking it or leaving crucial information out of your most intimate descriptions.

Learn to open your heart, especially in your first drafts – you can always cut things out later. It’s important because you not only add that little something extra to your writing, but interestingly, you can often feel better about yourself afterwards!

If you’re nervous about it, try keeping a secret diary where you write down your most evil and negative thoughts. This might seem strange at first, but it can also be quite liberating. You should find that you’re left feeling lighter and can more easily concentrate on being positive and giving in your life.

A friend of mine once told me he spent the first ten minutes of every writing session scribbling down the most disgusting pornography he could think of. He said it cleared his mind for writing proper! And he’s the successful author of several Fantasy novels!

I’m not suggesting you go this far but I know that when I’ve written out bad things that have happened to me, or that I have done, I feel better.

There’s a cathartic element to offloading unnecessary baggage that might be subconsciously clogging creative processes.

Go on, take a chance. Write down the most terrible thing you’ve ever done. Include everything. How you felt. Why you did it. Describe the physical sensations you experienced before, during and since.

You don’t have to show it to anyone.

I did this exercise once and handed the result to a friend. He said it brought tears to his eyes. He said he understood what I’d been through – how awful I’d felt. Most of all, he was grateful for the courage I’d shown in letting him read it – giving him access to my deepest shame.

I was very surprised and profoundly moved. Plus I’d been finally able to let go of something that had troubled me for years.

Try it yourself.

You might be surprised at the result too.

Only a month after it appeared in Analog in mid-December 1985, S. C. Sykes’s short story “Rockabye Baby” was well on its way to nomination for a Nebula, one of the two most prestigious awards in science fiction. It also had been picked up for a “Best of the Year” anthology, and was doing quite nicely in Ahalog’s own annual reader poll. Another story attracting much favorable comment in that poll (it was our readers’ favorite short story of the forty-two we published last year) and elsewhere was Stephen L. Burns’s “A Touch Beyond” (January 1985). “A Touch Beyond'’ was a first sale; “Rockabye Baby,” a second. Editors do buy, and successfully publish, stories from new writers.

Yet, a magazine like Analog receives so many submissions that it has room for only one or two percent of them. Many stories are rejected not because of anything conspicuously wrong with them, but simply because nothing sufficiently special about them makes them stand out from ninety-eight percent of the competition.

What makes stories like “Rockabye Baby” and “A Touch Beyond'’ stand out? How can you make your stories do the same? The key words are imagination, discipline–and the first word in “science fiction.”

What about writing? It’s important, but good writing is not enough. Oh, it can be. If your writing is truly extraordinary, you may breathe enough new life into an old idea to make something fresh and commanding of it. “Rockabye Baby” deals with a paraplegic faced with the opportunity to have his nervous system restored to normal–at the price of all his present memories. The idea of nerve regeneration is not new to science fiction, but the vividness with which Sykes makes the reader feel what it’s like to be handicapped–and what memories really mean–makes the story unforgettable. “Emergence,” by David R. Palmer (another highly successful first story, which we published in January 1981), brings some novel twists to the global holocaust and superman themes–such as minimal use of nuclear weapons to trigger biological ones, and a plausible way for a natural epidemic to produce a new “species”–but the basic ideas behind the story are among the oldest in science fiction. The story draws most of its impact from a remarkably vivid portrayal of an exceptionally memorable character. Palmer dared to tell his story through the journal of an eleven-year-old girl, trapped alone in an underground shelter after the war, who doesn’t yet realize just how special she is. Her personality is so unusual, engaging and wide ranging, and every word so carefully chosen, that when Palmer complained that a routine copy-editing change of a single word was “out of character,” there was no question that he was right.

Few stories can pull that off. What I see more often are stories that are competently written–but little more - and don’t say very much. They lack content–ideas. Science fiction requires two sets of skills: writing, and imagining in that special way that makes speculations both plausible and integral to the story. I want to concentrate on that second set of skills. Too many writers try to get by on good writing alone, without developing
the other tools of their trade.

Adam and Eve, Revisited

To write science fiction, you must first understand what it is. Watching movies is not enough; most “science fiction” in movies and television is not science fiction at all, by the standards of written science fiction. If you haven’t read many science fiction books and magazines, you should–both to get a feel for what it takes to write them, and to avoid rehashing worn-out ideas. (Ben Bova, my predecessor at Analog, warned me that I’d get several stories a month involving a man and woman who find themselves alone on an unnamed planet and turn out to be Adam and Eve. I quickly learned to recognize these stories on the first page.)

Science fiction is fiction in which:

At least one speculative idea is integral to the story.

Whatever science the story uses is plausible in the light of known science.

What do these criteria mean? “Rockabye Baby” is very much a “people” story; you may not even realize it’s science fiction until you’re halfway through it–but its final impact depends completely on its characters’ having the option of the nerve regeneration process. In “Emergence,” the speculative ideas on which the story depends are a war that wipes out most of humanity and a new kind of human being that supersedes Homo sapiens. In Marc Stiegler’s “Petals of Rose” (November 1981, and yet another memorable story by a writer with only one previous sale), humans must cooperate on a long-range project with beings whose adult lives are one-day frenzies of intensely concentrated activity. In “A Touch Beyond,” Stephen Burns extrapolates the well-known “phantom limb” effect experienced by amputees to imagine a kind of surgery done telekinetically by surgeons who have sacrificed their physical hands; the story focuses on the other sacrifices such a surgeon is forced to make in exchange for his special ability.

As demonstrated in these examples, an idea being “integral” to a story means that you can’t remove the speculation without destroying the whole story. This does not mean that stories must contain a lot of talk about science or technology–or that the presence of such talk automatically makes the stories science fiction. The movie Star Wars is full of “science fictional” hardware and trappings, but at heart it’s a western. Replace the spaceships and light sabers with horses and six-guns, and you can tell essentially the same story in the Old West. In contrast, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (or the movie Charly) contains almost no science fictional gimmickry or jargon, yet it is quite clearly science fiction. It is a story first and foremost of what goes on in a particular human being’s mind; the speculative element-the one that makes Flowers a science fiction story in its comfortably contemporary setting–is the operation that increases Charlie Gordon’s intelligence. The book does not go into much detail about the operation–but everything that happens to Charlie grows directly out of it. Remove the operation and nothing remains of the story. You might still tell a story about Charlie Gordon, but it would not be even remotely this story. And it certainly wouldn’t be science fiction.

The plausibility of that speculation is also important. What can and can’t happen in a particular setting is determined by scientific laws, primarily those of physics, chemistry, and astronomy; there is strong evidence that these laws apply everywhere in the universe.

Others, such as the principles of earthly biology, are special applications of the more general laws of physics and chemistry. You must reckon with them if you’re writing about life on Earth, but physics and chemistry may lead to quite different biologies elsewhere (such as the silicon-based organisms in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s classic short story, “A Martian Odyssey'’).

To tell a plausible story about a situation covered by known scientific laws, you must know what those laws say and how they apply to your imagined situation. You will not, for example, write about enormous spiders running around eating people: a spider of such a size could not support its own weight.

Original Sins.

For another example, my first two novels, The Sins of the Fathers and Lifeboat Earth, form a single large story in which humans must escape an explosion of our galaxy’s core by accepting the aid of mysterious aliens who offer to move Earth bodily to another galaxy. The story is about people and what happens to their lives–but the changes in their lives are all consequences of the core explosion and planet-moving. In writing Lifeboat Earth, I had to make such calculations as the apparent position and brightness of the sun at various stages of the Earth’s journey and how much the ground appeared to tilt as a result of acceleration. It got so involved that I bought a programmable calculator and developed some fairly exotic programs that will probably never be used again.

“But I can’t do that,” you may say. “You’re talking about calculation, and I’m a writer, not a mathematician.” Sorry; you must do that, to the extent that you can, and get help when you need it. You don’t have to be a professional scientist or engineer; few stories need as much background calculation as Lifeboat Earth. But if you want to write real science fiction, and not fantasy or westerns with spaceships, you must check the consequences of your assumptions and see whether they work and what side effects they have.

How can you develop solid scientific backgrounds if you’re not a scientist? Learn all you can about everything. Take courses-but don’t depend on them. Learn to teach yourself. Read widely. Basic physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology are essential.

Virtually anything else will sooner or later prove useful: geology, psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics–the more the merrier. Use recent books, and don’t stop there. These fields change rapidly (astronomy has changed more in the last twenty years than in the preceding four hundred.) Watch the tip of the iceberg, at least, in magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist. All this reading serves not only as a safeguard against unworkable story ideas, but also as a source of good ones. Knowing where the present limits of knowledge are will suggest what lies beyond.

No matter how thorough your basic education, you’ll run into questions for which it has no ready answers. Things like “How long does a radio message take to get from Earth to Titan?” or “How high can a Piper Gherokee fly on a planet with ninety percent of the gravity and eighty percent of the atmospheric pressure of Earth?” Sometimes you can evade such questions by setting up your story in such a way that the exact numbers aren’t critical. But if you do give (or imply) numbers, make sure they’re consistent, because readers love to catch authors in mistakes. Learning about all kinds of things is part of the fun of writing science fiction; but since you also want to make money at it, you can’t afford to spend too much time answering simple questions. So it pays to develop good library skills, covering not onty encyclopedias and card files but also the semi-popular scientific journals and the scientific abstract indices. The more you can do for yourself, the better; but don’t hesitate to ask the reference librarian for needed help. The same applies to calculations: it’s nice to do them yourself, but some will probably be beyond you. For those cases, cultivate experts you can ask for help. Universities have them on all kinds of subjects, and many of them are surprisingly willing to help writers who approach them politely and professionally (which means first having done all you can on your own).

Fundamentals

Does all this mean that you must prove rigorously that everything you write about is possible, and that you must avoid things not covered by present-day science? Not at all. Science has changed radically just in this century; it would be arrogant and unrealistic to assume we’re not due for more big surprises. A fundamental breakthrough, by definition, cannot be deduced from existing theories. I use a “negative impossibility” criterion: anything that nobody can currently prove impossible is fair game for science fiction. For example, faster-than-light travel (FTL) is okay if you postulate it in a form that doesn’t contradict existing theory in any region of experience that has been thoroughly tested experimentally–even though it would surely require radical changes in theory outside the tested range. Several of my own stories, including Lifeboat Earth, have used a form of FTL in which objects can “tunnel” to superlight speeds without an increase in energy, while objects traveling below the speed of light act just as Einstein said they do. (The resulting consternation among theoretical physicists becomes part of the story background.) Other writers have used scientific rationales ranging from “hyperspace” (a shortcut through a dimension not normally perceived by humans, as in John W. Campbell’s The Mightiest Machine and Robert A. Heinlein’s Starman ]ones) to a new kind of force that increases with the mass it is accelerating (as in Norman Spinrad’s “Outward Bound”).

Psychic talents, like the Bergmann surgery in “A Touch Beyond,'’ are a somewhat special case. Parapsychological phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis are highly controversial in the scientific community. Some scientists think their existence is well enough established that further research on them is not only worthwhile but important, though the underlying mechanisms are not yet even remotely understood. Others dismiss everything that’s been done on the subject as sloppy or fraudulent and deny that there’s any real evidence that the phenomena exist at all. For science fiction, if you accept my negative impossibility test, it doesn’t matter whether “psi” phenomena have been proved to exist or not. If you portray them as something that could exist, in a way that is selfconsistent and does not contradict scientific knowledge that is well established, they are perfectly legitimate subjects for science fiction. But you do have to put them on a reasonably scientific basis–if not providing a detailed explanation for them, at least making sure they operate according to consistent rules. An occult or “anything goes” approach will not do.

Most speculative ideas are either “extrapolations” (based solidly on known science) or “innovations” (radically new concepts, subject only to the negative impossibility test).

With either type of idea, work out as much detail as you can–and include no more in the story than the reader needs in order to understand what’s going on. After doing all that work, it’s tempting to show it off-but resist the temptation. You don’t want to scare off readers who aren’t specialists–and even they will sense that you did the work, in a feeling of solidity that the story would otherwise lack. If explanation is necessary, slip it in subtly. Readers won’t accept large blocks of lecture, even if they’re disguised by having characters ask questions they wouldn’t really need to ask. A good rule of thumb: Know as much as you can about your background-and tell no more than you have to.

From Idea to Story

In its early days, much science fiction was written by scientists or engineers, such as Isaac Asimov, E. E. “Doc” Smith, and George O. Smith, who picked up storytelling as a sideline (and perhaps as an outlet - or speculations too {ar out for the “respectable” iournals of their professions). Many early writers, primarily concerned with exploring challenging ideas, did not shape words into stories with the finesse of today’s best writers.

The “New Wave” of the ’60s, associated with such writers as Harlan Ellison, Thomas M. Disch, and Samuel R. Delany, stressed experimentation with literary forms and techniques, sometimes giving these aspects greater emphasis than they did to idea content. There is less avant-gardism now; many editors are leaning toward clear, straightforward, vivid storytelling–and if it happens also to be especially evocative or subtle, so much the better. The lasting heritage of the “New Wave” is a set of standards for writing that are higher than ever before.

Yet, trying to make a story stand out with writing alone, without fresh and interesting ideas, requires awfully impressive writing. Trying to make it on ideas alone requires awfully impressive ideas. Most stories must be good on both counts. “Petals of Rose,” for example, is a story based on an idea so striking that it would have stood out even with mediocre writing. The Rosans, the aliens with whom humans must cooperate, live so fast and intensely that contact with them is dazzling and exhausting. The number of characters in the story is enormous and each exists for a very short time, yet the reader must come to know and care about each one during his brief appearance. That requires vivid, concentrated characterization (for example, the life of Sot Lai Don Shee lasts less than three pages, and Dot Laff To Lin lives and dies on a single page). Long-term cooperation between humans and Rosans is possible only because part of the memory of each Rosan generation is transmitted chemically to the next–but only a small part. One human, Cal, is driven over the edge by the inevitable death of one special Rosan student.

He tells a psychologist:

“I can’t stand it. Every day I teach the same thing, again and again, and the faces are different.” The last ended in a howl of horror. “Every day different, never the same person twice.” He whimpered. “Please, let me have iust one student twice.”

Since a story can almost always be analyzed as one or more people (or reasonable facsimiles) struggling to solve a problem, start plotting by trying to imagine the problems that would arise should your speculation become reality. Don’t try to plunge right into the story; play with the implications of the idea. Consider “Petals of Rose”: the Rosans live and die in a single day. How does that affect their concept of life? What do they think about humans, who the Rosans consider immortal? What frustrations and other problems do the humans suffer because of the short lives of their allies? Because of the short individual life spans, generations flash by, and the entire structure of the society can change within a week–how will this “instability” affect the humans?
Think of all the problems that will result from your idea that you can; don’t stop with the first one that comes to mind. Thinking of problems will inevitably suggest people who have them-and they will become your characters. When you know them well enough, you will begin to understand how they will react to their problems, and how those reactions create other problems, including conflicts with other characters. At each key point in the story, ask yourself what is the best thing each character can do–from his own point of view. Then let him do it. All you have to do is write it down.

Perhaps the most important fact a science fiction writer must grasp is that all the changes that make a future or a new world are interdependent. In Lifeboat Earth, for example, I started with an almost contemporary Earth, let the aliens make certain changes in it, and then figured out everything I could about what effects those changes had on life.

Both individuals and political economic systems had to react to the physical changes, and some of their actions in turn produced still more changes. And so on.

Building Worlds–And Moving Them.

Oddly enough, the first step in the creation of Lifeboat Earth focused on an idea that is barely visible in the finished story. I wrote a minor short story based on the realization that an FTL ship could be used to get a second look at an astronomical event seen years ago on Earth. Ben Bova, then editor at Analog, quite rightly bounced the story, but added: “The basic idea is good. What can you build on it?”

That kind of question is one of the few things editors are good for. It got me thinking, and when I realized that that idea could combine with a couple of others I had in my “What-do-I-dowith-it?” file, the story ignited and took off. The other two ideas were:

A galactic core explosion, like those seen in other galaxies, could have occurred in ours any time in the last 30,000 years–and we wouldn’t know it until the light reached us. Suppose the Earth were about to become uninhabitable and aliens offered to rescue us, but refused to discuss the reasons for their offer. Should we accept their help?

That last question is the basis of The Sins of the Fathers. Before you can start telling such a story, you must recognize and answer key questions. The questions, at this point, are more important than the answers, because knowing the problems that must be solved will lead to your story. In the case of Sins, the questions were: Is such an explosion possible and how would it affect Earth? That took library research. How could the aliens move planets, how did they get the ability, and why didn’t they want to talk about it? That required me to invent their civilization in quite a bit of depth, including tracing their history back far enough to provide consistent origins for all their characteristics. I had to invent their methods of travel in enough detail to provide a consistent chronology for the trip and, once the trip was underway, to understand how it would affect the planet being moved.

The central question of Lifeboat Earth became: What happens to human life during the trip? First I had to know the purely physical effects; that required the calculations I described earlier, which, given the assumed properties of the aliens’ innovative technology, was mostly extrapolation. Finally, I had to get to know some of the people affected and watch how they coped with such problems as surviving the loss of the sun, changing apparent gravity, radical changes in political systems to cope with the practical problems of survival, and the psychological problems of underground life and the wholesale extinction of the other species.

Then–and only then–I could write the story.

Writer Poul Anderson once remarked that the best science fiction requires a “unitary” approach, in which “philosophy, love, technology, poetry, and the minutiae of daily living would all play parts concomitant with their roles in real life, but heightened by the imagination of the writer.”

To which fellow SF writer James Blish added; “You will note, I think, that this is more than just a prescription for good science fiction. It is a prescription for good fiction of any kind.”

The famous philosopher Will James had just finished giving a lecture on the solar system in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he was approached by an elderly admirer.

She was shaking her head and her umbrella and looking very stern.

“Mr. James,” she admonished him, “I am shocked by your notion that we live on a ball rotating around the sun. That is patently absurd. “Politely, James waited, inclining his head toward her.

“We live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle,” the Grande dame announced. James, ever gentle, asked, “If your.., um… theory is correct, Madame, what does this turtle stand upon?”

“The first turtle stands on the back of a second far larger turtle, of course,” the old woman replied.

James lifted his hand. “Ah, Madame, but what does this second turtle stand upon?”

The dowager’s eyes were bright. She laughed triumphantly, “It’s no use, Mr. James–it’s turtles all the way down!”

And so it is with writing fantasy–whether books for adults or children, whether a plot revolving around elves or unicorns or travel through time or angels stalking the earth or Chinese dragons having tea with detectives. Each book stands on the back of story. And as the old lady in Cambridge would agree, it’s no use–it’s story all the way down.

The writing of fantasy relies on that relationship, thrives on the ironies of a modern intelligence at work on the old tales, is enhanced by the juxtaposition of what-we-knownow and what we-once-believed. Making fantasy stories is sciamachy, or boxing with shadows. Old shadows. Devious shadows. Wily shadows. Weird shadows. Our own
shadows.

Writer as the Careful Observer

Since the creating of fantasy worlds, which contains universes, is built on the sturdy crust of story, the first important rule is that one needs to be sure of one’s roots. Socrates said about allegories and myths that:

He is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labor and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous monsters. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his time.

In other words, do your research and believe in your monstrosities–at least as long as you are writing of them. Otherwise your skepticism will translate into condescension on the pages and alienate readers.

It is difficult enough to make believable what is not, in broad daylight, believable: the seelie court alive and well in Minneapolis, water rats and moles conversing and messing about in boats, a furry-footed manikin out to save the world by tossing away a magic ring, a boy pulling a sword from a stone and thus becoming a king, a young man fighting his shadow self for possession of power, a young woman calling her dark sister out of a mirror, a world in which dragons can be ridden through time and alternate space. The writer of such stories must know something, then, about the seelie court, about the habits of water rats and moles, about his own furry-footed manikin’s genealogy, about all the things that will bolster belief. Belief by the author, belief by the reader.

Background, then, is important. The landscape of the world must be carefully limned. Sometimes, as in Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, the place is real and the author lives there. Still, as well as Bull knows Minneapolis, she had to research material on the seelie or elvin court. Sometimes the author takes a trip to the place, as Ellen Kushner did for her novel Thomas the Rhymer, striding across the Eildon Hills of Scotland, avoiding cowpats and taking notes. As I did for The Dragon”s Boy, scouting the Glastonbury marshes for duckweed and frogbit and brightyellow kingcup and the white clusters of milk parsley, my wildflower book in hand. Sometimes the research is done in libraries only, as Susan Shwartz did for her fantasy novels about the Silk Roads. But in fantasy, outer landscape
reflects inner landscape. The hills and mountains must be true, whether they are based on actual places like Minneapolis or Scotland or England or China–or are made up analog fashion, from places in the author’s mind. All of the fantasy authors I know own research volumes on wildlife, wildflowers, insects, birds. Peterson’s Guides have a use Roger Tory Peterson never intended, perhaps, but they are useful all the same.

Analog fashion. By that I mean if you are not using the city of Minneapolis or the actual Eildon Hills or the fenland around Glastonbury with the for mounding up over the quaking land, but rather a construct of your own, it needs to have some sort of referent in real life. Writers need to be observers first.

If you have never seen a mountain, I mean really looked at one, don’t put a mountain in your fantasy land. If you have not studied a wildflower and noted that certain types grow in marshy places, others in drier scrub, then don’t pepper your fantastic landscape with red and blue catch-me-nevers or beggar-my-neighbors or whatever you decide to call them. You are sure to describe a hothouse variety where only a scraggle-rooted one will do. And don’t send seabirds salling over mountaintops, or water pippits stalking up rock slides. Look hard at the real world and then look slightly askance. That is how you make your fantasy analog. As Emily Dickinson advised in one wise little poem, “Tell all the truth/but tell it slant.” Fantasy looks at the world through slotted eyes.

So, too, the creatures of a fantastic world need careful observation. If you intend to use elves, for example, don’t rely on Tolkien or any other modern writer’s elves. Go back to source. You will find that elves are not the cute, pointy-eared, fur-loinc lothed critters that modern comic books would have us believe. Rather, according to older lore gleaned from such books as Katherine Briggs’s The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature or her An Encyclopedia of Fairies, they are amoral, they are lovers of tidyness, and they set high value on courtesy and respect, and yet “honesty means nothing to (them). They consider they have right to whatever they need or fancy, including.., human beings themselves.” Or if you want to put dragons in your story, find out as much about the difference between Western and Eastern dragons as a start, and then decide if your dragons could exist. (Would they, for example, need hollow bones like large birds?) If you wish Wotan or Coyote or Manannan MacLit to come striding into your fantasy, go back to source to get the descriptions of clothing, speech patterns, and the color of mist that wraps around the god. If you decide to depart from source, at least you will know what you are departing from. The dilution of modern mythologies comes from writers who think that a Dungeons and Dragons manual is prime source material or that they can know all about Hercules from watching B movies and learning what the acronym SHAZAM stands for.

So the writer as careful observer comes first. If the writer creates what Eleanor Cameron calls “the compelling power of place,” building up the fantasy world or the real world in which the fantastic takes place with a wealth of corroborating details, the reader will have to believe in the place. If the place is real enough, then the fantasy creatures and characters–dragon or elf lord or one-eyed god or the devil himself–will stride across that landscape leaving footprints that sink down into the mud. And if those creatures are also compelling, having taken root in the old lore and been brought forward in literary time by the carefully observing author, those footprints in the mud can be taken out, dried, and mounted on the wall.

Writer as Vatic Voice.

The vatic voice is the prophetic or inspired or oracular voice. Nowhere in writing is this voice used as narrative so well as in the literature of the fantastic. Fantasy is dreamer’s history and often it is the dreamer’s voice, the bard afire with the word of God, vates.

The voice of fantasy pipes through the writer down strange new-yet-old valleys wild. There is nothing tame in the world of faerie. Tendrils of green lianas crawl across the paths. Invisible beasts call from behind dark trees. The world is moonlit, a chiaroscuro world where light and dark are in constant play. But the calling is not one voice, the piping not one single tone. One might almost name three: the oracle, the schoolboy, and the fool.

The oracular voice speaks in a metaphoric mode, from hollow caves, out of swirling mists of perfumed, drugging smoke, in riddles and gnomic utterances. It sings with the bardic full chest tones. This is the sound of the high fantasy novel. Three who do it to perfection are J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, and Patricia McKillip. Others include Robin McKinley, Meredith Ann Pierce, and Lloyd Alexander. It is no coincidence that riddles play an important role in their books.

There is the riddle of the ring poem in the beginning of The Lord of the Rings that binds the three books (really four, counting The Hobbit) with as fierce a power as the rings bind the characters who dare put them on.
And in Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea, the riddles Ged, the young master wizard, must ask himself, have to do with shadow and substance, good and evil, light and dark.

He is told by the Master Wizard: This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done for good or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!

Ged answers, driven by shame: “How am I to know these things when you teach me nothing?” His finding the right answers to the riddles of his master’s teachings are, of course, the basic thrust of the book.

Patticia MeKillip uses the riddle itself as the main metaphor for her entire trilogy. In The Riddle Master of Hed, the riddle is the key to Morgon”s self-knowledge. As he says, “The stricture according to the Riddle-Masters at Caithnard is this: “Answer the unanswered riddle!” So I do.” And he spends the rest of the three volumes trying to learn to temper his passion for unriddling with wisdom, compassion, and an understanding (inherent in all great fantasy novels) that magic has consequences.

The oracular tones are the full basso profundo of fantasy dialects, the ground bass on which the melodies of the others overswell. The words are sometimes archaic–elven, sorcery, stricture. Sometimes they are fanciful, Latinate, sonorous. There is frequent use of alliterations: “a ring to rule them”; “pleasure or for praise.” And the sentences, like chants, often end on that full stop, the strong stress syllable that reminds one of a knell rung on a full set of bells. One can declaim high fantasy, sing out whole paragraphs, even chapters. I expect that if they were set to music, it would be Beethoven, full and echoing, melodic, resonant, touching deep into the most private places of the heart.

The schoolboy voice is more securely set in the here and now. While fantasy figures bend and bow around it, the voice remains childlike, innocent, a sensible commentary on the imaginary. Ray Bradbury, E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones, and Natalie Babbit reign supreme here. The voice speaking in ordinary tones about the extraordinary recall us to our humanity in the midst of the fantastic.

Listen to the way a Nesbit child reacts when first coming upon a psammead, a creature that has “eyes on long horns like a snail’s eyes.., a tubby body.., shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur.., and.., hands and feet like a monkey”s.” She says: “What on earth is it?… Shall we take it home?” which seems eminently childlike and sensible.

And while in C. S. Lewis’s Namia wars and witches are raging, the voice of a very real British schoolboy, Eustace, meeting the elegant and marvelous talking mouse Reepicheep, who has lust bowed and kissed Lucy’s hand, remonstrates:

“Ugh, take it away,” wailed Eustace. “I hate mice. And I never could bear performing animals. They’re silly and vulgar and-and sentimental.”

Two schoolchildren”s reactions to marvels: opposite, apposite, and very real. And when Winhie Foster in Babbifs Tuck Everlasting first hears the strange story of the Tucks and their water of everlasting life, she thinks not about the unbelievability of their history but rather about the humanity that confronts her:

It was the strangest story Winhie had ever heard. She soon suspected they had never told it before, except to each other–that she was their first real audience; for they gathered around her like children at their mother’s knee, each trying to claim her attention, and sometimes they all talked at once, and interrupted each other in their eagerness.

There, quite simply, is the key to the schoolboy voice. The child in this kind of fantasy takes over the role of the adult, shepherding the fantastic creatures through their paces, guiding, guarding–even when frightfully afraid–for this world belongs to the child, this world in which magic has slipped through. And it is not the magic itself that is startling, because children expect that kind of magic to occur, but the vulnerability of the creatures of magic who are sad in their magnificence and, in Eustace’s words, sometimes “silly and vulgar and–and sentimental.” The child responds to this vulnerability by becoming both more childlike and yet adult, a paradox seen whenever a child plays house, giving advice and taking it at one and the same time.

These are the middle tones, carrying the tunes so familiar to us, dancing in and out of the fantastic as a Bach fugue does, using a simple tune made more complex by its interweaving; plain, unelaborated except where the fantastic itself is concerned, it is the everydayness of the language that reveals when set against the extraordinary. Natalie Babbit does this brilliantly, eschewing the fanciful for the ordinary in the opening of Tuck Everlasting. She reports with a painter’s eye, and that report becomes the metaphor for the book:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

The third voice, high and piercing, full of ridiculous trills and anachronisms, ludicrous and punning, is the voice of the fool. But don’t be guiled by it. Underneath the pratfalls and the bulbous-nose mask, behind the wild shrieks and the shaking of slapsticks, lie deep, serious thoughts. As Montaigne says in his Essays, attributing it to Cato the Elder, “Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.” Examples of this voice are Lewis Carroll, Sid Fleischman, Norton Juster, Terry Pratchert, Esther Friesner, and Craig Shaw Gardner. Like a comic opera by Mozart, there are wild, sweet melodies hidden amid the silliness, and you would be a fool indeed to miss them.

When Lewis Carroll invented his Mad Teaparty, he little knew that it would serve generations of English teachers and writers as well as children. Listen:

“You should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least–at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see!”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I sleep when I breathe”!”

“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter…

That is not just straight silliness. The applicability to everyday life is so fierce in Alice in Wonderland that I wish to remind you of the time of Watergate in this country when the following phrases–and more–were lifted from the Alice books by columnists, commentators, essayists, and editorialists and used to explain politics:

“I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works” “Believing six impossible things before breakfast” “Sentence first, verdict after”

“Curiouser and curiouser”

Sid Fleischmann’s humor is regional, hyperbolic, and anything but casual. The silliness is unrelieved, or so it seems. But Fleischman is a traditionalist when it comes to humor, and he knows well how to disguise pain with the puttynose, to teach us wisdom with a wisecrack.

In Chancy and the Grand Rascal, my favorite of his many books, Chancy, who is so skinny he’d “have to stand twice to throw a shadow,” goes through a series of picaresque adventures in order to find his family because “kin belonged together, didn”t they?” And when a wicked man is described as “gander necked.., with a nose like a stick,” the absurdity of it sets the tone and character with economy and grace. We laugh, but we are properly fearful, too.

Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth is not just a book-long play on words, although at times it may seem so:

“If you please,” said Milo [speaking to King Azaz the Unabridged] “…. your palace is beautiful.” “Exquisite,” corrected the duke. “Lovely,” counseled the minister.

“Handsome,” recommended the count. “Pretty,” hinted the earl.

“Charming,” submitted the undersecretary.

“SILENCE,” suggested the king. “Now young man, what can you do to entertain us? Sing songs? Tell stories? Compose sonnets? Juggle plates? Do tumbling tricks? Which is it?”

“I can’t do any of those things,” admitted Milo.

“What an ordinary little boy,” commented the king. “Why my cabinet members can do all sorts of things. The duke here can make mountains out of molehills. The minister splits hairs. The count makes hay while the sun shines. The earl leaves no stone unturned.

And the undersecretary,” he finished ominously, “hangs by a thread. Can’t you do anything at all?” That is a hymn to language, our use and misuse of it that William Satire, Russell Baker, and Edwin Newman would envy. But it is also story–not Sunday editorial polemic. In the end, of course, the voice of fantasy is not a particular dialect at all–not the oracle, the schoolboy, the fool. There is a much older voice that lies in back of them all–the storyteller’s voice–bridging the gap of history, singing to us out of the mists of time, telling truths.

As the Maori people say when beginning a tale:

The breath of life,
The spirit of life,
The word of life,
It flies to you and you and you,
Always the word.

If the fantasy story does not have that breath of life, whether it uses the words of the oracle, the schoolboy, or the fool, it does not deserve to live and will lie, stillborn, on the pages of a dust covered book.

Writer as Visionary.

It surprises no one that writers of realistic fiction write about the society in which they live, that their stories reflect current thinking, and that fictional accounts of child abuse or women’s rights or nuclear issues are published in the decade of public awareness and social legislation. But fantasy authors are just as mired in society as authors of realistic work are, though their work is like the wicked queen’s magic mirror that does not always
give back the expected answer.

For example, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies is a picture of the underbelly of English society in the nineteenth century, but the plight of poor chimney sweeps is only the mirror’s first casting. What Kingsley didn”t realize was that later readings would judge his anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic attitudes, which are only slightly disguised in the book, rather more harshly than he ajudged the rich-poor dichotomy. Rudyard Kipling’s otherwise brilliant The Jungle Books is marred by jingoism. Mary Popins and Dr. Doolittle share a cultural bias against peoples of color. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in its first printing showed the Oompa-loompahs with skin “almost black” because they are “Pygmies… imported directly from Africa,” as if they were so much yardgoods. In later printings of the book the little workers in Willy Wonka”s factory have been transmogrified into a different color and a different place of origin.

What is easy to see with these examples is that fantasy books deal with issues (consciously or unconsciously, in a good light or in a bad) as thoroughly as realistic fiction, but one step removed. For example, Randall Jarrell’s book The Bat Poet is about the artist in society, Le Guin’s Tehanu about woman’s power, Patticia Wrightson”s A Little Fear about active old age, my Sister Light, Sister Dark about the integration of personality as well as the inaccuracies of history.

But it is the phrase one step removed that is the most important. Fantasy fiction, by its very nature, takes us out of the real world. Sometimes it takes us to another world altogether: Demar, Middle Earth, Namia, Earthsea, Prydain, the Dales. Sometimes it changes the world we know in subtle ways, such as showing us the “little people” who live behind the walls of our houses and “borrow” things. Or that in a very real barn, but out of our hearing and sight, a pig and a spider hold long, special conversations.

Sometimes a book of fantasy travels us between planets (A Wrinkle in Time), between worlds (the Oz books), or between times (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur”s Court), or the traveler himself is from somewhere else, such as Nesbit’s psam-mead or Bull”s pucca or Diana Wynne Jones”s goon.

By taking that one step away from the actual world, the writer of fantasy can allow the reader to pretend that the book is not talking about the everyday, the mundane, the real society when indeed it is. It is a convention all agree to. A mask. In eighteenth century Venice, when masked bails were common, it became a convention that a person who wished to go about the street and be treated as if he were disguised needed only to wear a pin in the shape of a mask on his lapel. Thus accoutred, he was considered masked and could act out any part he wished without fear of shame or retribution or recognition.

So fantasy novels go capped and belled into literary society, saying in effect: this is not the real world we are talking of, this is of course faerie, make-believe, where bi-colored rock pythons speak, where little girls converse with packs of cards, where boys become kings by drawing swords from stones, and where caped counts can suck the blood of beautiful women in order to live forever.

Children who read fantasy may be beguiled, because they may not totally understand the conventions. They mistake the pin for the real. They write to Maurice Sendak and ask for directions to the place where the Wild Things live. They believe in Namia and Middle Earth and Prydain and Demar, and for them these worlds may become even more real than the every day. After all, when we write about such places we must adhere to three very persuasive laws: first, that the fantasy world have identifiable and workable laws underpinning it. (Lloyd Alexander says that “Underneath the gossamer is pre-stressed concrete.”) Second, that there is a hero or heroine who often is lost, unlikely, powerless at first or second glance, or unrecognized and therefore easy for the reader to identify with.

And third, that in a fantasy novel things always end justly–though not always happily. Come to think of it, adults also are beguiled–at least for the length of the book–that such things are so because of those three laws.

Therefore, it is important that writers of fantasy be aware of the moral underpinnings of their work. Lloyd Alexander wrote, “Fantasy, by its power to move us so deeply, to dramatize, even melodramatize, morality, can be one of the most effective means of establishing a capacity for adult values.” Thus the writer of a fantasy novel must have a vision of the world, must be a visionary.

Of course, there is this to be understood about writing any kind of novel: the novelist knows very little about what she or he is doing at the start. We learn more as events, characters, and landscape take form. Every plunge into a new novel is a parallel adventure - for the hero and the novelist. Like our fictional counterparts, we take a journey into the unknown. We authors are Joseph Campbell’s definition of the hero: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder:

fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” We venture forth from our writing rooms - the world of common day into the supernatural wonder of the story. We encounter supernatural forces like slippery words, monstrous, unwieldy plots. The decisive victory won is the book completed. And after all, there is only one letter difference between the words boon and book, which we bestow on readers everywhere.

Once we understand the vision, it is our basic charge that we must write all stops out to make that vision sing. It is, after all, what fantasy does best, has done always. Turtles all the way down.

The first time I met Kelly Freas, the renowned science fiction artist, he had lust published a series of posters to promote interest in and support for the space program. The entire series was displayed on walls throughout the house, and Kelly was asking all the guests at a party which posters they thought most effective. He found a fascinating pattern in the results. “Verbally oriented” people always picked the one showing a moon rocket, three ghostly sailing ships, and the phrase, “Suppose Isabella had said no…” “Visually oriented” people always picked theone with no words, just a picture of a rocket “hatching” from an Earthlike egg.

Writers, by the nature of their work, tend to be “verbally oriented.” But they would do well to realize that many of their readers are less so. Most readers do not pick up a novel or short story to admire the author’s cleverness in turning a phrase, but to experience vicariously something they cannot experience directly. Your job as a writer is to make your reader forget that he or she is reading and give him or her the illusion of being in the story, seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling what’s happening to your characters.

Hence the oft-repeated dictum: “Show, don’t tell.”

What, exactly, does that mean? I’ve found that the most important key to making a reader see a scene vividly is that the author must see it clearly to be able to convey the illusion to someone else. And one of the best pieces of advice I can give a writer suffering from a tendency to tell rather than show is this: try telling it as a play.

All the World’s a Stage.

Telling rather than showing breaks down into several specific types of faults: describing character rather than showing it through dialogue and action; directly disclosing thoughts of non-viewpoint characters; summarizing dialogue as indirect discourse instead of quoting it directly; speaking in generalities rather than specifics. All of these things tend to distance the reader from the scene and reduce the illusion of being a part of it. In a play you can’t do those things. Except for a few special cases of unusual structure, like the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or Sakini in John Patrick’s The Teahouse of the August Moon, there is nobody on a stage to tell you what kinds of people the characters are. The only way you can find out is by watching what they do and listening to what they say to one another. And they say and do specific things, which the playwright must spell out. So if you’ve written a scene for a story in which you have told too much that you could have shown, a good way to force yourself to find specific ways to solve the problem is to recast the scene as a play–and then translate the result back into story form.

Let’s see how it works in a hypothetical snippet of a badly written story: Ralph stepped nervously into Commissioner Reed’s office. It was clearly the office of a career bureaucrat, and Ralph could see at a glance that Reed was the kind of bureaucrat who did everything by the book and disliked anything that threatened to deviate from it. But the fate of California depended on Ralph’s convincing him in the next few minutes that he had to deviate from the book.

Reed already had Ralph’s dossier in front of him and seemed to be reading the crucial article. He looked up and greeted Ralph with a few words of perfunctory small talk. Then he said, “So what you’re saying in your paper is that you’re sure the Big One is coming in six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive?”

“That’s right,” Ralph replied nervously, trying to collect his thoughts and brace his confidence for the confrontation to come.

“But your cure,” Reed grated, “is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Right?”

“I’m afraid so,” Ralph admitted as apologetically as if it were his fault. He drew himself up and said firmly, “But if we let the earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot more.”

“How much money7″ the bureaucrat demanded.

How does this go wrong? Let me count the ways. We are told that Ralph is nervous, but we are left on our own to picture how this affects his behavior. It would be better to do it the other way around: show us how he acts and let us conclude for ourselves that he is nervous. We are told that Reed is marked by his office and his personal appearance as a career bureaucrat who can’t stand things that don’t fit standard procedure, but we’re not shown a single piece of evidence to justify Ralph’s sizing him up that way. Their conversation begins with “a few words of perfunctory small talk,” but again we’re left to guess what they are–whereas if they were quoted, they themselves could provide some of the character clues that we haven’t been given in any other way. Once Ralph and Reed get down to business, every speech is described by an adverb or worse, and the author seems determined to find a new synonym for “said” every time anybody opens his mouth.

Now try it as a scene of a play:

(We see an office lined with glass-fronted bookcases, locked and filled with leatherbound volumes. A single desk sits in the middle of the room, its top empty except for a telephone and a folder containing several papers. REED, a slightly built, tight-dipped man of fifty or so, with a few strands of greasy black hair combed haphazardly across his pate, is frowning through thick, rimless glasses at the top paper in the folder.

RALPH enters through the door and walks to the desk, checking his belt buckle and smoothing his hair down with quick little motions as he goes. When he reaches the desk he stops, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Reed looks up at him, not lifting his head but simply peering over the tops of his lenses. Ralph avoids meeting his eyes directly.)

REED: Hmph. So you’re Tambori. RALPH: Yes, sir.

REED: And what you’re saying here (he taps the paper) is that you’re sure the Big One is coming in six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive? RALPH: That’s right.

REED: But your cure is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Right?

RALPH: I’m afraid so. (He straightens up and looks Reed in the eye.) But if we let the earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot more.

REED: How much money?

A few things still have to be described, of course. Furniture and other fixed features of the physical setting can’t speak for themselves; human beings can and should. The theater audience will see what the scene looks like by looking at it, but the stage manager has to be told how to set it up for them. The actors need some suggestions - such as Ralph’s avoiding Reed’s eyes and Reed’s peering over the top of his glasses while keeping the rest of himself aimed at his desk–of how to convey their personalities and states of mind. But the way people talk is conveyed simply by what they say and bow they say it. The adverbs and “said-bookisms” are gone. There is no place for them on the stage–and there’s seldom a need to put them back in when you translate it back to a story:

There was nothing in the room except some cases of musty books and a single wooden desk, and the desk was bare except for a telephone and a folder containing a few papers. Reed, a slightly built, tight-lipped man of fifty or so with a few strands of greasy black hair combed haphazardly across his pate, seemed to be studying the top paper intently through thick, rimless glasses. He was frowning, and Ralph shifted his weight back and forth from one foot to the other as he waited for the commissioner to speak.

When he finally looked up, he didn’t lift his head but simply peered at Ralph over the tops of his lenses. “Hmph. So you’re Tambori.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what you’re saying here”–he tapped the paper–”is that you’re sure the Big One is coming in six months, but you know a way to make it less destructive?”

“That’s right.”

“But your cure is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. Right?”

‘Tm afraid so.” Ralph drew himself up and looked Reed in the eye. “But if we let the earthquake go its own way, it will cost a lot more.”

Reed scowled. “How much money?”

Notice that not only are the adverbs and strained synonyms for “said” gone, but even the word said itself is seldom necessary. As on the stage, once the audience or readers have been given a picture of the characters and setting, they can fill in for themselves such details as who’s speaking and in what tone of voice. On the printed page, where they can’t physically see and hear who’s speaking, they may need an occasional reminder - but with only two characters “onstage,” this can be provided easily and unobtrusively by an occasional reference to something else one of the speakers is doing, like, “Reed scowled.”

There is still room on the printed page for an occasional direct reference to the viewpoint character’s thoughts, but even those can often be avoided. The original reference to how important this meeting is seemed unnecessary in the revision because that would have already been hinted at in earlier scenes, and the reason for its importance quickly becomes apparent in the dialogue of this one. The very existence of a viewpoint character
is perhaps the most essential difference between a story and a play, but it’s not as big a difference as it first seems. In a play, everybody is revealed only through his words and deeds. In a story, one character is known more directly–but even he, and through him the reader, remains an audience for everyone else.

As the writer, you, too, see much of the action from an audience’s viewpoint. But this can work to your advantage: if you visualize your characters and their doings clearly enough, all you have to do is watch what they do and write it down.

Setting the Stage.

There are, of course, a number of important differences between a play and a story. One is that the reader does not actually see the stage, so you as storyteller have to create it in his mind-and you want him to feel as if he’s in the scene, not looking at it from section 6, row 5, seat 2. I’ve been talking about “seeing” and “watching” and “visualizing,” but those are really a metaphorical shorthand for “perceiving and experiencing.” Seeing is perhaps our most vivid and detailed sense, but much of the fullness of the world comes from the fact that it is only one of several. Poul Anderson, probably best known as a science fiction writer but highly regarded in several other genres as well, has said that in setting a scene, he consciously tries to appeal to at least three of the reader’s senses. Consider the following, for example, the fourth paragraph of a scene in Anderson’s novel The People of the Wind:

By then they were strolling in the garden. Rosebushes and cherry trees might almost have been growing on Terra; Esperance was a prize among colony planets. The sun Pax was still above the horizon, now at midsummer, but leveled mellow beams across an old brick wall. The air was warm, blithe with birdsong, sweet with green odors that drifted in from the countryside. A car or two caught the light, high above; but Fleurville was not big enough for its traffic noise to be heard this far from the centrum.

This brief paragraph plants not only visual images, but sounds, smells, the feeling of warmth, and even tactile sensations in the mind of the reader, with just a few words each. The phrase “old brick wall” alone tickles at least three senses for any reader who has ever seen and smelled and felt one. When your story is set in a place similar to ones the reader has experienced, a word or two like rosebushes can trigger a great deal of imagery. If the setting is not likely to be familiar to the reader, as often happens in science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels, the writer can take less for granted and may have to work harder, and even use more words, to give the scene enough depth to draw the reader in.

Even then, though, careful choice of the words is often preferable to using vast numbers of them. Anderson has a special knack for bringing alien worlds to life by giving things found there the sorts of instantly evocative names that human colonists might coin for them:

Further down a slope lay sheds, barns, and mews. The whole could not be seen at once from the ground, because Ythrian trees grew among the buildings: braidbark, copperwood, gaunt lightningrod, iewelleaf which sheened beneath the moon and by day would shimmer iridescent.

No reader of The People of the Wind has ever seen a braidbark, copper wood, or jewel leaf–but every reader gets an instant picture from each one-word name, complete with overtones like suggestions of texture. No reader gets exactly the same picture that the author had, but that’s not important. What is important is that each gets a picture, suitable as a setting for the action and substantial enough for verisimilitude.

The Viewpoint Character.

These days, most successful fiction is told as if seen through the eyes (and other senses) of a single character, called the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character may not be the same through an entire story, particularly a long and complex one; but each scene, at least, is experienced by the reader as it is experienced by one of the participants.

This means, for example, that a passage like this one won’t work: Astonished, Elmer looked at Esmerelda standing in the doorway. He’d never expected to see her again, and he didn’t know whether he should invite her in or throw her out.

There was no doubt in her mind, though. She’d come back for revenge, and she could hardly wait.

It’s true that people used to write that way, but most readers and writers have become so used to the greater vividness and immediacy of narration from a single clearly defined viewpoint that “omniscient” storytelling now seems remote, artificial, and confusing. The word astonished, and the description of Elmer’s thoughts and feelings, solidly establish him as the viewpoint character. Telling what is in Esmerelda’s thoughts seems to do the same for her. The reader is left disoriented, unable to feel a part of the scene because his or her perceptions seem to keep jumping randomly around the room. If Elmer is the viewpoint character, with whom the reader is to identify for the duration, he has no way of knowing what’s in Esmerelda’s mind-except as it’s suggested by her external appearance and actions. The last two sentences, for example, might be replaced by:

She smiled, but there was an odd quirk to her lips, and she looked more directly into his eyes than she had ever done before. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked. “Uh . . . sure.” Only as she stepped across the threshold did he notice the slight bulge under her jacket that could only be a shoulder holster. tell it that way and the reader never leaves Elmer’s head-and may feel a shiver along with him, without being told to.

Beyond the simple technical requirement of consistency within your chosen viewpoint, you need to understand how your viewpoint character thinks and feels. If your heroine has been a private detective for ten years, she’s not going to react to things in the same way as if she’s been a nun for ten years. A nun who became one out of deep religious conviction may be very different from one who entered an order to hide from the secular world. This is why you’re often advised to construct biographies for your important characters: because what happened to them before the story will profoundly influence how they see and react to events during the story. One important thing to remember, though, is that hardly anybody is either a villain or an idiot in his or her own eyes.

Everybody’s actions make sense–from his or her own point of view. As a writer, you must understand that point of view and convey it sympathetically, no matter how much you may personally disagree with it. In fact, a good exercise for broadening your range of characters is to set out deliberately to write sympathetically about a character you personally find distasteful.

The Rest of the Cast

At first glance, it may seem self-contradictory to talk about seeing the story through the eyes of characters other than the viewpoint character. The reader normally doesn’t– but the author should.

The reason is simple: if you don’t, your other characters will tend to act in the way most convenient for you, rather than in the way that makes the most sense for them. Since the driving force of a story is conflict, often among characters, the critical points in a plot are likely to involve two or more characters flung together in a situation in which each of them has to make a decision. (Should Elmer try to throw Esmerelda out, or should he scream, or should he try to reason with her? Does she really want to do something as drastic as killing him, or will that mess her life up even more than it already is?) In the real world, if the decision is about something that matters to both parties, they’re both likely to invest a good deal of mental and/ or emotional energy in deciding what to do–and upon reflection, it often happens that the best course a person can choose is not the first one that might spring to mind. In fiction, all too often a writer is determined to have the hero or heroine’s life go a certain way, and so has the other characters do things that will steer it in that direction. The result often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to cardboard puppets–with the strings showing.

Negative examples are easy to find; we’ve all read or watched too many war stories and westerns in which the bad guys were just plain bad, with never a thought for whether they would actually have any reason to do the specific things they did. For a positive example, you might look at Forest of the Night, a first novel by Marti Steussy, about human colonists on a harsh planet whose native inhabitants include creatures called “tigers” for their superficial resemblance to their terrestrial namesakes. In the early part of the book, the resemblance seems to go even deeper, as several incidents occur in which tigers are seen to attack humans, sometimes killing or injuring them, sometimes leaving them unharmed. In the hands of a less careful writer, this could easily have been another of those tedious tales of humans under siege by alien predators who are nothing more than mindless killing machines. But Steussy’s tigers are actually highly intelligent, and there’s a very specific reason for every one of the mysterious features of the “attacks.”

You don’t find out what those reasons are until much later in the book–but the reason the book makes sense is that she thought those incidents through from the tigers’ point of view before writing them, even though she first described them only as seen by the humans.

Occasionally a writer will explicitly show an incident from more than one viewpoint in the finished story. This happens repeatedly in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s recent novel World’s End, chronicling the interwoven histories of two families living in the Hudson Valley between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and retelling many key incidents from the viewpoint of everybody involved. Unless you have a very special reason for doing this, though, it’s usually better to think each part of the story through from each important character’s viewpoint, but then tell it only once, from that viewpoint which is most effective for that scene. To minimize the risk of reader confusion, it’s also best not to change viewpoint even when you change scene unless there is a particularly good reason to do so–and virtually never within a scene.

Epilogue.

Several of the most useful skills you can have as a fiction writer are nothing more than looking at the substance of the story in the right ways: through the eyes of an imagined audience; through more than one sense; from inside the viewpoint character; and through the eyes of characters other than the viewpoint character. All but the first of these may be thought of as secondary skills for the act of translating the play back to story form. But the basis of the whole process is that initial step of visualizing the action in dramatic form.

When I first mentioned this idea to an actor and playwright friend, he said, “Good idea–but I’d take it a little further. Tell them to write it not only as a play, but as a play without parenthetical instructions to the actors on how to say their lines.” That may sound extreme to a fiction writer used to relying heavily on adjectives and adverbs–but if you think about it, that’s how Shakespeare did it.

And look where it got him.

One of the main drawbacks about writing fiction is that you generally have to write a novel or two before you go to a publisher. This is especially true for the beginner. You can spend anything up to 2 years, or perhaps even a lifetime writing a novel.

And all that time you’ve had to support yourself, live your life AND find the time to write. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could just pitch an idea to a publisher, get the money, and THEN write.

If you’re a professional, you can do that. William Goldman, author of classics like Marathon Man and the soon to be remade Stepford Wives, says he doesn’t bother writing novels and screenplays anymore.

He just writes ‘pitches.’ He comes up with ideas, forms a synopsis and pitches the idea at whatever medium he wants to experiment with, whether it be Hollywood or an agent or a publisher. And only when he’s got a green light and some cash up front does he actually sit down and do some writing.

Nice work if you can get it. But it’s actually not so rare as you might think. Hollywood especially, increasingly works this way. Individuals and production teams spend their time coming up with ideas they pitch to movie producers who will find actors, funding and contracts before anyone even thinks of contacting a scriptwriter.

Of course, if you’re a successful author, you can get paid for books you haven’t written of course but that’s because you have a track record.

How can the humble beginner compete? Simple. Write non-fiction.

Here’s how to do it:

Step One: Come up with an idea for a non-fiction book. It could be a coffee table book with pictures, a biography of a current or historical figure, a self-help guide, whatever you fancy.

Step Two: Write the pitch including a brief synopsis of the book, chapter by chapter, a report on why your book will sell and some good reasons why you’re the person to write it. (This is not as hard as it sounds!)

Step Three: Post out this pitch to a dozen relevant publishers.

Then, sit back and wait. If none of the responses come back positive then repeat the process until someone bites. And eventually they will. Even if you explained you won’t be writing anything until you get an advance!

The publishing industry is starved of good non-fiction and everyone is waiting for the next surprise best seller. As long as you have the enthusiasm and can convince a publisher of the soundness of your idea and your ability to execute it, you too can get to write books for money.

But wait up, you’re thinking, but surely little old me doesn’t have the credibility or the credits to get a gig like this?

Well, let me tell you a story. I met a guy recently who was paid to write a ‘Screenplay Writing for Dummies’ type of book. Over a two-year period he was given advances totaling $50,000. When I spoke to him, I asked if his publisher had ever asked him whether he had any credits or experience or was indeed, in any way ‘qualified’ to write a article like this.

He frowned, looked at me quizzically and said, ‘No. It never came up!’

Here’s a trick I learned from Shakespeare. The next time you’re putting a fictional story together, have a good look at your characters and their relationships.

What are they? Friends? Work colleagues? Strangers?

One of the ways to “raise the stakes” in drama is to “connect” your characters more closely. For example, sisters and brothers fighting is more interesting than strangers doing the same. Husbands and wives trying to kill each other is much more intriguing than psychos stalking unknown victims.

Always try to up the ante.

Now - see your characters as even bigger! Not just sister and brother but Queen and Consort. Not just husband and wife but God and nymph. Not just employee and boss but janitor and CEO. It’s a theatrical technique as old as Ancient Greece but it still works.

In order to make your characters “classic”, you create archetypes that are larger than life. Why have a girl in a dead-end job hating her boss and eventually winning through when you could have a successful businesswoman, with millions to lose, fighting against a multinational conglomerate?

You see, readers like the big fight, they like stories where it’s do or die. For instance, you have a story about a schoolteacher fighting to preserve a gym facility. Good, but take it further – mythologize it. Make it a struggle between good and evil – between the oppression of the authorities and freedom of speech.

Never be afraid to take on the larger issues in your work. Try to get to the core of human values. Shakespeare did it well. On the surface he wrote about Kings and Queens but beneath, he wrote about all of us.

Hamlet is a case in point. On one level it’s a play about a King who’s not ready to take the throne. On another, it’s a thesis on adolescence. Think through the opportunities that life and death issues might offer your writing.

Reality is good. But bigger is better – take it from Shakespeare!

I came across this article by Sarah White which i found interesting. Read on.

Sometimes as a writer, you wonder if you are just screaming into the void or if your words are really touching other people, helping them out in some way or changing the way they think. As a writer who writes a lot about writing, I want my words to help people become better writers, to make more sales and have more confidence in their craft.

In the few months since Rob and I first published “Doing the Write Thing: The Easy Way to Self-Edit,” I have been lucky enough to hear from some readers of the book and articles I have written about it and discover how the ideas I present have helped them.

Many times the comments I have received have had to do with the fact that my advice validates ideas they already had about writing. They are gratified to know they were doing some things right and eager to try other things I suggested.

As an example, one reader writes: “Your ideas were really good and I have found the best thing for me is printing it [the manuscript] out and reading it. Sometimes in this high tech world I think I am wasting so much time to do that, but I am more able to catch my mistakes.”

I love this comment because it’s funny how we as writers know that something is good for us, we know that it helps, but we don’t want to do it because it takes too much time.

We’re in such a rush to make sales we don’t even want to do the things we know will help us make sales!

Others have been thankful that I mentioned the value of taking time away from a manuscript before trying to edit it. If you think it takes too much time to go through these steps, think about how much more time, energy and resources it takes to send out a error-filled manuscript over and over looking for a publisher who is willing to fix it?

When you think about it that way, a little extra time on the front end is nothing if it helps you sell your work faster. And that’s really what all of this is about. Most of us write because we want to be published, we want to share our thoughts and ideas with others and hopefully get paid for it.

That’s what this article, this system, is really all about.

It’s not about making you learn arcane grammar rules or tying your muse up in the closet while you painstakingly rewrite every word of your manuscript. It’s about providing you with tools and ideas, all of which will improve your writing and your chance of sales. You don’t have to do every step every time, but as you read through the book and think about your own writing, I think you will see the value of these steps and how your writing will improve immediately, even if you don’t adopt all of the suggestions.

And as your writing improves, your number of sales will improve. And there’s really nothing better than that.

Recently, an esteemed correspondent of mine pointed out that the ‘Murder Your Darlings’ quote that I always attribute to F Scott Fitzgerald (see article here) was actually a phrase used by William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize speech. I wondered at this and decided to do an Internet search.

To my surprise, the phrase is originally attributed to Arthur Quiller Couch, and used subsequently by authors from Virginia Woolf to Stephen King. Whatever its actual source, perhaps the most important thing here is that the concept of ‘murdering your darlings’ is one that strikes a real chord with writers. Always has, always will.

It’s funny, I’ve had new writers send me (sometimes quite angry!) emails - appalled by the suggestion that they cut out all the good bits in their writing, complaining that would leave nothing left, etc., or that the process would somehow detract from their enjoyment of writing. I think this attitude misses the point somewhat. You see, it’s not the ‘good bits’ you’re taking out, it’s only the bits that don’t help the writing - and they are very often the same bits you are most proud of - some clever turn of phrase or simile or metaphor, whatever.

Because, basically, it’s not ‘clever’ to try and ‘look clever’ in your writing - it actually makes you look amateurish and self indulgent.

Your primary job as a writer is to transfer strong images and good ideas from your head into the mind of another person - a kind of telepathy if you will. The words are the medium you use but in a sense, they are also the barrier that can limit this process.

So the next time you’re reading through your material, it’s wise to remember that the truly great writer is the one who will sacrifice any and all of their words if the point, the image, or the story, suffers.

The bad writer is the one who leaves in all those long, pointless descriptions, their ‘academic’ literary references (that nobody gets!) and insists on telling instead of showing. If you want to write like this, you may get grants from your local state council to develop your work, but I guarantee you won’t sell many books!

Remember the old adage: If in doubt, leave it out!

How many times have you heard people say this about a book? Have you ever analyzed the books that people say this about?

I have.

They all share one ‘secret’ in common.

Questions.

Reading is not a passive exercise. Not to the brain, anyway.

As you read and take in the information on the page, the brain is trying to work out where the story is going, what significance certain actions might have. It’s also trying to work out puzzles and generally try to second-guess the plot.

This is human nature. It’s what makes reading an interactive experience–where you have a kind of relationship with the author for as long as you’re reading.

Stories that don’t make the reader ask questions are unsatisfying to read, as are stories where the reader guesses the outcome.

Many writers forget this and write aimlessly in the hope that the reader will like their style and want to read on, no matter what.

This is not a strategy for success! In order to be in control of your story - and your reader, you, the writer should feed them questions. This is not as difficult as it sounds.

First you need the major question - your book’s reason for being, if you like.

Questions like ‘Does money create happiness?’ or ‘Will good triumph over evil?’ You should subtly place this question in the mind of your reader quite early on in your book, so that the reader is already on a kind of quest for the truth.

Next you have chapter questions that are more specific to your characters. Like ‘Will Alex overcome his problems?’ or ‘Will Sally win the love of her father?’ This gives your reader a reason to read on–just to find out!

Then, you should have smaller questions at every point you can - at least one every 500 words.

Here’s an example:

‘Lucy went to see her father. He was angry that she was seeing Brad but she told him there was nothing he could do about it’

Obviously this is flat and lifeless prose that invites no great speculation. How about this?

‘Lucy stared at her father’s implacable face. When he was like this, she couldn’t gauge his feelings. She swallowed hard. If he was angry, she’d end up with nowhere to live.

‘I won’t stop seeing Brad,’ she said, not quite believing her own words.’

You see the difference?

In the second passage the reader is forced to ask three questions.

1. What’s her father thinking?
2. Will Lucy get kicked out?
3. Will she carry on seeing Brad?

Rather than simply stating what your characters think and do, always try to leave an element of uncertainty in the reader’s mind as to what will happen next.

The trick is to get your reader asking questions constantly. Yes - on every page, so that there’s a compulsive need to turn the page, if only to find out the answers.

Good novelists do this unconsciously - they know it’s the best way to tell a story. Good crime novelists deliberately get you to ask all the WRONG questions so that their plot twists are far more effective.

People keep turning the page in best selling novels because they are in a constant state of limbo - ignorant of what’s coming next but eager to find out. In effect, it’s almost a state of agitation, even frustration that will keep a reader turning the page.

Has this happened to you?

It’s weird because you almost HATE what you’re reading - there are so many unanswered questions - but you just can’t put it down!

1. Always avoid alliteration.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague–they’re old hat.
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
8. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
9. Contractions aren’t necessary.
10. Do not use a foreign word when there is an adequate English quid pro quo.
11. One should never generalize.
12. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
13. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
14. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
15. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
16. Avoid archaeic spellings too.
17. Understatement is always best.
18. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
19. One-word sentences? Eliminate. Always!
20. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
21. The passive voice should not be used.
22. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
23. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
24. Who needs rhetorical questions?
25. Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
26. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
27. Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
28. Subject and verb always has to agree.
29. Be more or less specific.
30. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
31. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
32. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
33. Don’t be redundant.
34. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
35. Don’t never use no double negatives.
36. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
37. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
38. Eschew obfuscation.
39. No sentence fragments.
40. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
41. A writer must not shift your point of view.
42. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
43. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words to their intecedents.
44. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
45. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
46. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
47. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
48. Always pick on the correct idiom.
49. The adverb always follows the verb.
50. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
51. If you reread your work, you cn find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
52. And always be sure to finish what